The OP has incorrectly stated the trolley problem. The question isn’t, “Should you switch the track or leave it as it is?” The question is, “Imagine the case of a trolley that’s going to hit 5 people, and you can switch it to only kill 1 person. Obviously, you switch it. But now imagine five people who will die of organ failure and the only way to cure them is to sacrifice some other person for the spare organs. Obviously, you won’t do that. What is different about these two scenarios that leads us to a different choice?”
And yet, many people in this thread have said otherwise, so is it really “obvious”?
Ethics debates are popular among people who overthink things. If you think about anything long enough and hard enough, you can work yourself into any irrational position.
Not true. The original version was:
Foot’s version of the thought experiment, now known as “Trolley Driver”, ran as follows:
Suppose that a judge or magistrate is faced with rioters demanding that a culprit be found for a certain crime and threatening otherwise to take their own bloody revenge on a particular section of the community. The real culprit being unknown, the judge sees himself as able to prevent the bloodshed only by framing some innocent person and having him executed. Beside this example is placed another in which a pilot whose airplane is about to crash is deciding whether to steer from a more to a less inhabited area. To make the parallel as close as possible, it may rather be supposed that he is the driver of a runaway tram, which he can only steer from one narrow track on to another; five men are working on one track and one man on the other; anyone on the track he enters is bound to be killed. In the case of the riots, the mob have five hostages, so that in both examples, the exchange is supposed to be one man’s life for the lives of five.
There have been innumerable different versions (including the organ donor version) but that is the canonical original one.
It remains that the question is about the difference that causes us to leap to different answers, when it seems like the “math” of the situation is the same.
If you’re answering, “Switch” or “Frame the person” or “Harvest the organs”, then you haven’t actually answered the trolley problem.
If you do come to the same answer for any particular combination of trolley problems then you need to keep hunting to find more examples, so that you have at least two with (to you) different answers.
The general pattern that I notice would be that we have at least two different axes:
- Solvability - How likely it is that there may be some other solution
- Applicability - How likely it is that this situation would recur
With the trolley, we can envision the entirety of the scenario. The problem is literally railroading us into two very specific outcomes. We can imagine all of the paths very easily and be confident that the real options are A or B. And that’s largely due to the urgency of the matter. Given a few minutes and the freedom to run around, we might be able to find a piece of metal and jam it under the wheels. We might be able to find some more clever solution. Minus that freedom of intervention, we have to accept the math of the situation: 1 death or 5 deaths. That math is easy.
But as we get more complex cases and less urgency, we can imagine that there are likely to be better interventions beyond the ones that we’ve been offered. We might be able to find a cure, we might be able to talk down the mob, etc.
And as we see more future applicability - disease isn’t going to end, people are going to continue to be irrational - we understand that the importance of finding a real solution is more important. If we can improve medicine or we can raise the education of the people, then we can have a perfect solution in the future. Raising awareness of the problem by allowing more people to die helps to bring focus on the real solutions and over time we will have fewer deaths because we targeted the long-term.
It’s a more complicated version of the prisoner’s dilemma and the iterated prisoner’s dilemma. You get different answers based on the timescale that you’re looking at - and that’s purely rational.
I don’t think there’s only one point to it. Like art, different people take different things away from it. What many people take from it is that in the real world, looking for a third way is the best option. And that–fighting the hypothetical --is, to my mind, a perfectly legitimate approach, and tells me just as much about the person as a “stay” or “switch” response tells me.
No, it’s not a trolley problem–or if it is, I fight the hypothetical. I do my best to serve that kid while also serving the other children, and I recognize also that not all kids need the same amount of my time, and meanwhile I look for underlying causes for their troubles to see if we can address those.
So, maybe it IS a trolley problem after all, and I’m a “fight the hypothetical” kind of guy.
Oh, hell, I’m gonna do the politics thing after all, because I think it’s one of the closest to trolley problem things in the world.
Imagine two political parties, just hypothetically speaking let’s call them the Republicans and the Democrats. You’re in a country where, in a few months, there’ll be a juncture–a switch in the tracks, if you like. Down the first track track, a relatively small outrage against human rights will occur. Down the second track, a much larger outrage against human rights will occur. A little north of a hundred million people have their hands on the lever, all pushing and pulling toward one track or another. Fun twist: a death cult has convinced tens of millions of people to pull toward track 2.
Do you pull toward track 1? Do you pull toward track 2 (because, presumably, you’re a fan of death cults)?
Or do you fight the hypothetical and insist that nobody can force you to like track 1 with its smaller outrages against human rights, because they’re still outrageous, and refuse to put your hand on the lever, instead going out to handcraft a beautiful third track out of colorful popsicle sticks that leads to Candyland and that the train absolutely positively 100% won’t go down?
Like I say, the trolley problem does have some real-world applications.
This is a pretty funny take on hypothetical philophy questions:
To those fighting these hypotheticals, as others have mentioned, we face trolley problems all day long. Requiring backup cameras will raise the price of each car, but will save lives. However, at the margin, some who could afford a car now can no longer afford it, their car dies, they lose their job, and commit suicide. Should we add backup cameras?
Thats clearly ethically dubious
I mean surely it’s very ethically dubious to drive at Hitler while drunk, I mean you might miss him 
If you press the little red button on the lower right of that page, there’s an extra panel that exactly covers this point.
LOL “homogenous well-mixed fascists” (kinda like the GOP nowadays)
I’ve heard the trolley problem before and never had a really good answer to which way I would go. However, then I saw Left_Hand_of_Dorkness’s comment:
And my answer would be an automatic: No, I would not kill the one person to save the five sick people. But to be honest, I don’t know why I feel so sure about my answer here, vs the original Trolley Problem.
Here is the problem with the Trolley Problem. Obviously a moral person would choose to flit the switch and save five.
But in the Real world- that would be a bad choice- first the heirs of the one person would sue you for everything you have. Next some overzealous DA might bring manslaughter charges against you.
See- if you leave it alone and walk off- the trolly kills five. If you intercede- YOU kill one person.
Nightmares, lawsuits, criminal charges.
Sure, you could be able to persuade a jury you did the right thing- but the legal fees alone would ruin you.
So the problem is The Real World.
I would have no problem going to jail if that was the cost of saving the five over saving the one.
I honestly find that problem with the problem to be a trivial problem. Of all the ways to fight the hypothetical, that one isn’t very persuasive to me.
People who have not been into a prison micght say that. But you lose your job, your home, leave your family in the lurch, and suffer the risks of shanking, beatdowns, etc.
It is not fighting the hypothetical. It it setting it in the real world.
Suffering legal consequences (or, in the case of the fictional story LHOD linked above, social ones such as being ostracized) makes it harder to do the right thing. But it doesn’t change what the right thing to do is.
Note that one of the reasons the British government decided to prosecute the Mignonette case (where shipwrecked sailors were prosecuted for killing and eating a comatose shipmate) was to enshrine in common law the fact necessity (the legal reason things like a fire fighter smashing a door, that would otherwise be criminal damage, is legal) was not a defense for murder:
So yeah I think you’d be 100% liable for criminal prosecution
It is so easy to turn your response around.
If you lost your job and your family and were sent to prison, would you be willing to have five strangers die violently to have all that reversed?
That is just the opposite- since YOU would CAUSE the five to die- just like in the trolley problem- your actions caused one man to die.